Jawid Danish is an Afghan who had to leave his country in 2015. He is a student now in Finland, a lover of history and politics, a writer and public speaker, an activist. This is his first book, written so he could tell the story of his journey from his home in Baghlan to his new life in Helsinki. He has also spent a lot of time in Greece and is a fan of swimming in the Aegean and playing chess for hours in his favorite cafés. He is planning on a career that includes a focus on social justice and human rights.
This is a compelling first-person account of Jawid Danish’s multi-year and often harrowing odyssey as an “unaccompanied minor” from Afghanistan seeking refuge in Europe.
After the death of both his parents (one to violence, the other to illness), his older brothers encourage him to leave his native village in Afghanistan at age of twelve for a safer life in Europe. By turns terrified and hopeful, at the mercy of ruthless operators but also inspired by the bravery and kindness of strangers, he lucidly recounts the experience of pushing his physical and mental limits to keep going on this solo journey across central Asia to Iran, then to Turkey, on to Greece, and finally to join an older brother in Finland.
In many ways, his experience is all too common: thousands have undertaken substantially the same passage in recent years. But very few of them have been in a position to convey this experience to a larger public, and most of us find it very hard to imagine. In spare and limpid prose, Jawid brings alive one version of the refugee plight, offering the perspective of a young adolescent boy on his own.
Over the arc of his story, there emerges a strong sense of him as an uncommonly bright, charismatic, articulate, and resilient young man. He is also, he tells us more than once, exceptionally lucky: unlike many, he meets along the way, he has happened upon people able and willing to help at just the right moments. So today, he benefits from legal status in Finland, allowing him to excel in his studies at an international high school in Helsinki and to imagine a future fully capitalizing on his considerable talents.
A coda recounts devastating news from home that sends him into a downward spiral and offers a powerful reminder of the fragility of the refugee situation, even for the luckiest and most resilient.
